Saturday, December 27, 2008

The Trouble With Google News

There's a certain broad class of blogger that I almost always ignore; one of them is on sites that insist on having someone cover every team, an insidious disease that almost always ends up with low-quality writing. Mostly, this wouldn't be a problem for me — ignore them and move on — but for whatever reason, Google News insists on giving some of them the same credibility as ESPN or Yahoo Sports, which is to say I periodically end up with pieces like this in my inbox. In it, Josh Levitt exhorts the Angels to sign Adam Dunn; by itself, not a terrible idea, but

The Angels already have a free-swinging, aging slugger in Vlad Guerrero (not to mention a team philosophy that tends to make this a consistent problem). Dunn is useful at the right price, but he interjects other problems into the Angels lineup, and given the team's tendency to use the DH as a resting spot for Vlad, a perma-DH like Dunn is liable to cause scheduling friction.

Seriously, guys, at least try to keep up with the team you purport to write about. And as for Google News, under what possible criteria can they treat a website like this one as a legitimate news site?